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Gear / Technical Help => Recording Gear => Recording Media => Topic started by: china_rider on February 16, 2006, 02:19:38 AM
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Hey all... Found a segate 8 gig microdrive on amazon for about $150 shipped.....
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BO0SGG/102-4315052-9248169?n=172282
It is a 3200 rpm 2 meg cache.
I'm thinking of getting it but was wondrering if anyone more in touch than me may know if this is fast enough to record at average cd rates... I'd also love to do 24/96 if it can handle it.
Any opinions?
Stay Kind,
Dana
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This may help a bit. I have a 5gb Seagate Microdrive, that I picked up on ebay, and it was really cheap. (I cannot recall the price, but it was easily a steal compared to what was out there at the time.) I have used it many times now with my Microtrack 24/96, but always at 44.1/16 bit which I am guessing what you mean by average cd rates. In that capacity, it has been flawless, live loud noisy venues, quiet venues, etc. I am very happy with it. If I have one negative, it eats power, probably more than a CF card, but I have a small battery box I use to make this a non issue.
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Theoretically, it should work perfectly at 24/96 (as its write speed is 2 MB/s and 24/96 only requires 0.56 MB/s). In practice, you never know with microdrives until you've actually tested it... (I haven't had much time over the past few months to read many threads here (and searching doesn't come up with much on the 8 GB Seagate microdrive), but what I have read up until October is that 4-6 GB (6 GB being the largest anyone had at the time) microdrives should be able to do 16/44 (or 48) recordings flawlessly, but one may end up with glitches (e.g. pops or skips) in their recording when using 24/48 and above.)
Searching for 'seagate 8gb (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/search.asp?query=seagate+8gb&page=1&forum=all)' on the forum at dpreview.com (http://www.dpreview.com) gives some good information (I noticed that Matt Cham has posted some benchmarks of the read and write speed via a USB 2 CF reader). Also, Seagate has a little bit of information about the 8 GB midrodrive (specifications are listed in the product manual) on their site: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/external/ (I used Google to search their site for the model number of the microdrive as their search page wasn't working when I tried it, and I don't like trying to find things by manually digging through web sites).
And some additional information that may be helpful:
http://www.core-sound.com/pdaudio_system/6.php
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PenComputingAudio/ (I'm not a member of this group, but I have heard that it's a good place to go for the kind of information you're looking for.)